Thoughts on std.system.OS

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-08-14 21:20, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Sunday, August 14, 2011 19:24:21 Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> On Sun, 14 Aug 2011 02:47:21 +0300, Jonathan M Davis<jmdavisProg at gmx.com>
>>
>> wrote:
>>> Personally, I'm
>>> inclined to drop the Os enum along with the os and os_major and os_minor
>>> variables, because I just don't think that we can get them to be correct
>>> enough of generally useful enough to be worth having. It's too
>>> OS-specific to
>>> be trying to handle it in an OS-generic manner like that.
>>
>> Looking at the code again, I noticed there's a Family enum, which seems to
>> me closer to what the OS enum should really be. I think Family should just
>> replace OS.
>>
>> I don't agree that we should just drop version numbers. As I said before,
>> they can be useful for users. They can also be useful for programs that
>> care only about a certain OS family.
>>
>> What do you think about this?
>>
>> https://github.com/CyberShadow/phobos/blob/new-std-system/std/system.d
>
> I'm not at all convinced that it makes any sense to try and handle OS version
> numbers in a system-independent manner. You have to know what OS you're on for
> them to mean anything, in which case, why try and handle them in an OS-
> independent manner?
>
> On Linux, the version number is probably pointless. It's the version number
> for the kernel. Most programs won't care one whit about that. If they care
> about a version number, odds are that it's the version number of some program
> or library on the system that they're using, not the kernel. And in general,
> if you care, you care when you compile, not when you run the program. I would
> expect FreeBSD to be the same. I don't know about Mac OS X.

I think it makes sense to be able to get version information about Mac 
OS X. I would consider Windows XP, Vista and so on be similar to Mac OS 
X 10.5, 10.6.


-- 
/Jacob Carlborg